Thursday, March 1, 2012

Sociopath porn (part 2)

I actually like reminders of how fragile my existence is. My existence is fragile because society is fragile. When I acknowledge my own mortality, it's just another way of recognizing how rife society is with weakness -- weaknesses that are just calling out for someone like me to exploit them. I see hope in that. Pleasure, even. Interestingly, I think that this is also the sort of message the painter of the above linked burn-victim series is trying to convey.

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I think the painter is also simply trying to show us how beautiful some things can be that are assumed to only be horrific and ugly and never can be anything else but that. The textures, patterns, colors, composition of the burns and deformities, all within the safe space of a bounded frame.

These are kind of reminscient of Francis Bacon's works in a way, but the interesting thing is that they are not abstracted or surrealized by the artist, because the people are already abstracted in real life. Impressionistic even. You can even forget that these are portraits of humans and they become works of pure abstraction.

I like how you can see parts of the body that are normally hidden inside. The stuff people don't want to know about or see, but is so integral to life, to being alive, to surviving. A reminder of how the body is not merely a box made of skin, but actually functions as a holistic yet indifferent machine, a fact that is sometimes so easy to forget about in the day-to-day.

Yeah, I also love looking at stuff like this. People with deformities and congenital diseases and extra body parts and missing body parts and stuff like that. The shunned, the hidden, the wrong, the ugly, the lurid, the ill. A way to get to that part of humanity that most prefer to forget and deny, yet is so integral to life.

To me they're burn victims and nothing more. I don't see anything symbolic about their disfigurement, they just look distasteful. The only meaning I can take away from these victims, is not to act like an idiot with fire.

I mean this. One has to know who one is. A person cannot unmask willy nilly. That would be like running down the street naked. However, one has to have the ability not to lie to oneself. That is what I mean by unmask i.e. not lie to yourself about who you are. Capiche :)

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Of course, my default is still to intuitively analyze every outcome and situation and achieve the best result, but it's more interesting to let people remain a variable and go in their own direction, rather than nudging them in the direction I prefer. Interacting with people WITHOUT trying to control them is a new paradigm for me.